Formation of virtual groups in WBAN for health care monitoring

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) provides a great opportunity in health care monitoring. The need for an efficient WBAN patient monitoring, where information extraction is done, sent across to many individuals such as the doctors and nurses to analyze the condition of a patient. This paper addresses certain challenges for efficient transmission of data, by proposing a topology which allows virtual groups to be formed between the devices (sensor nodes and mobile devices) of patients, nurses and doctors in order to perform remote analysis of WBAN data. Group formation is performed by timely updating the patient's data for vitals such as temperature, ECG, EEG, heart rate and many more. The WBAN data gathered are transmitted to the virtual group members through an underlying environmental sensor network. This virtual group will send and receive the data for a particular amount of time by using network protocols. By doing so, it is easier for medical persons to monitor the critical patients where timely help can be provided immediately, preventing loss of life due to delay in transmission. The proposed approach is evaluated through a series of simulation using network simulator.